Layoffs at NBC, Putting Numbers to Print’s Demise

There is not a lot of good news to report this morning. TVNewser is reporting that NBC will be cutting 500 jobs, or 3% of its total workforce, at all levels of the company including television, film, and parks. The first round is apparently already underway. See TVNewser for more details.

Meanwhile, the Gannett Blog is saying the the Gannett layoffs are nearing 1,800. We also now have a some numbers to put to all the dire newspaper news we’ve been reporting on the last few months. The Newspaper Association of America is reporting that U.S. newspaper advertising revenue collapsed by nearly $2 billion, or 18 percent, in the third quarter.

The year-on-year quarterly percentage decline is the worst since since the NAA has been keeping such records and represents an increasingly rapid deceleration that began in the third quarter of 2006, when total ad spending dropped 1.5 percent.

Even online advertising fell by 3%. Speaking of online numbers, Doomsayer Nick Denton is taking issue with E&P‘s just released list of top online news sites. He even made his own graph! And we love graphs.

Per Denton:Nielsen’s own news and information rankings include miscellaneous weather and directory sites. Neither includes entertainment sites such as People.com. So I’ve taken the media research outfit’s latest audience numbers for the top 50 online properties — whether they’re brands that began in print (gray), on television or radio (dark gray) or are native to the internet (red). It’s as good a guide as we have to the new media landscape.

Conclusions? First of all, internet-born properties such as Yahoo! News, The Huffington Post and Gawker Mediaâ€”with 14 of the top 50 propertiesâ€”do not dominate.